Guild Size
DroneTheMask
Member
I would like to put this out there while its still up for discussion.
Pirate Software has finally begun masse recruiting for his mega-guild Actual Pirates:
In this recruitment message, he's making the argument that guild sizes ought to be increased from the currently planned 300 member maximum, up to somewhere between 10-15k. He states this number is too small because he has 12,000 members in his guilds discord - according to him, this will be the norm.
A few concerns.
1) Connections.
He has direct contacts with the devs - a few are even apart of the guild. This gives him great influence towards a bad idea. Hence I felt compelled to write here, hoping to counter it.
2) Privilege.
Streamer has around 12k concurrent viewers every day all day. Of course his discord numbers are egregiously large. This will not reflect the average guild by any means. He's intelligent and aware of this - it benefits his position if he can fit more people into less alliances. Presuming the numbers not change, he can currently fill a minimum of 10 alliances. This will be a weakness against his ability to organize in-game. Increasing this limit will not benefit the average guild looking to carve themselves a node, it benefits him. Do not be fooled by his propaganda.
3) Game Design
Server / Guild sizes should be determined early, as this will have a ripple effect into other parts of the game. Each node will have a finite amount of space for players, mobs, resources, dungeons, etc. If the space is too large, the server feels dead. If it's too small, you're going to be surrounded by strangers who may or may not roll you for all your materials. You will never be able to explore in peace. Instead, it will almost certainly be a constant brawl.
4) Consequences.
EVE was a great example of what happens when you have a few corporate sized giga-guilds made up of free labor chumps who are sold on their corps ink-stamped propaganda pieces controlling 90% of a server: a handful of privileged nerds that realize that peace is profitable. Profit maintains power.
But to the average gamer, peace is boring. This will be the fate of whichever server Actual Pirates lands on. If they have their way, this will be the fate of every server eventually. Because in politics, groups already naturally converge to give themselves greater affluence. Tribes become an alliance. Alliances become superpowers. Superpowers conspire with one another to uphold the status quo.
5) The Alternative
Right now, it seems the team projects and designed around 50,000 players per server (https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Servers). These servers will currently have guilds at most the size of 300 people (guild points pending). Giving power to smaller guilds will be what fends off the peace-creep, and maintain a continued struggle in the politics of sandbox MMOs. Becoming a piece on the board should be a relatively simple task. Maintaining the piece should be an achievable struggle. Difficult? Yes. But it should be possible.
If you've ever looked into the social-politics of Albion Online's "Black Zone", you know its a constant flux of power struggles which has kept that player base entertained for years. How? They have a 300 player limit on guilds, which can be apart of an alliance that's limited to 4 total guilds. Sound familiar?
Do not let some ancient EVE raddled nerd with streamer privilege convince you or the devs to follow the steps of a dead game which he himself quit.
Thanks for reading gamers.
- Drone, the Mask.
Pirate Software has finally begun masse recruiting for his mega-guild Actual Pirates:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXHVpLWp35A)
In this recruitment message, he's making the argument that guild sizes ought to be increased from the currently planned 300 member maximum, up to somewhere between 10-15k. He states this number is too small because he has 12,000 members in his guilds discord - according to him, this will be the norm.
A few concerns.
1) Connections.
He has direct contacts with the devs - a few are even apart of the guild. This gives him great influence towards a bad idea. Hence I felt compelled to write here, hoping to counter it.
2) Privilege.
Streamer has around 12k concurrent viewers every day all day. Of course his discord numbers are egregiously large. This will not reflect the average guild by any means. He's intelligent and aware of this - it benefits his position if he can fit more people into less alliances. Presuming the numbers not change, he can currently fill a minimum of 10 alliances. This will be a weakness against his ability to organize in-game. Increasing this limit will not benefit the average guild looking to carve themselves a node, it benefits him. Do not be fooled by his propaganda.
3) Game Design
Server / Guild sizes should be determined early, as this will have a ripple effect into other parts of the game. Each node will have a finite amount of space for players, mobs, resources, dungeons, etc. If the space is too large, the server feels dead. If it's too small, you're going to be surrounded by strangers who may or may not roll you for all your materials. You will never be able to explore in peace. Instead, it will almost certainly be a constant brawl.
4) Consequences.
EVE was a great example of what happens when you have a few corporate sized giga-guilds made up of free labor chumps who are sold on their corps ink-stamped propaganda pieces controlling 90% of a server: a handful of privileged nerds that realize that peace is profitable. Profit maintains power.
But to the average gamer, peace is boring. This will be the fate of whichever server Actual Pirates lands on. If they have their way, this will be the fate of every server eventually. Because in politics, groups already naturally converge to give themselves greater affluence. Tribes become an alliance. Alliances become superpowers. Superpowers conspire with one another to uphold the status quo.
5) The Alternative
Right now, it seems the team projects and designed around 50,000 players per server (https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Servers). These servers will currently have guilds at most the size of 300 people (guild points pending). Giving power to smaller guilds will be what fends off the peace-creep, and maintain a continued struggle in the politics of sandbox MMOs. Becoming a piece on the board should be a relatively simple task. Maintaining the piece should be an achievable struggle. Difficult? Yes. But it should be possible.
If you've ever looked into the social-politics of Albion Online's "Black Zone", you know its a constant flux of power struggles which has kept that player base entertained for years. How? They have a 300 player limit on guilds, which can be apart of an alliance that's limited to 4 total guilds. Sound familiar?
Do not let some ancient EVE raddled nerd with streamer privilege convince you or the devs to follow the steps of a dead game which he himself quit.
Thanks for reading gamers.
- Drone, the Mask.
14
Comments
Then he will have to pvp with his own people. He mentions Eve Online but that had all players on one single game server. Here that many players will lock out others form their server. And those other players will happily go somewhere else.
All we need is enough servers and to know where the big streamers are to avoid them.
The alternative is the mega-guild splitting up and making up a smaller array of guilds across a variety of different servers... in which case the problem is solved, because there's no singular ultra-guild on any given server.
The most reasonable way for Thor and his posse to get what they want without crippling their fun is to spread across several servers but not a ton of them and basically just be an alliance worth of guilds on several servers, being a well-coordinated group where people can just choose not to play on their servers with them because they don't dominate the entire map and there's servers that don't include them. Alternately, since they can't establish a monoculture, it'll be possible for other factions to form and oppose them, which sounds like fun for those factions.
Either they've contained themselves to a single server, they're so spread out as to not be any more of a threat than any other guild, or they're restricted to a small number of servers other players can still deal with. No matter what, problem's solved, even if they uncapped the guild roster size.
Didn't he say between 1000 and 1500 Members ? And like 1200 People on his Discord ?
12K Members in the Guild = - > Every single Person on a 9K Server will be in the same Guild. (LOOOOOL)
Now THIS is what i imagine absolute Dominance to be like.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Kinda starting to look for a Guild right now. (German)
Eve players don't understand fantasy games, and streamers don't understand games that intentionally refuse to appeal to the mainstream. Terrible combination in a single person for feedback to a game like Ashes.
Intrepid honestly needs to make a public announcement that, as a guild leader, you can't treat your guild members like pawns in your years-long game of chess, if you want to have success and a good time in Ashes. The systems just aren't laid out that way.
You don't structure your guild to "make content" for your guild members, you structure your guild so everyone can flourish in the existing game world, and contribute to its growth by their own directive. For that, you need to let people have their own objectives; you can't micromanage what your players will be doing for you. That will fail to retain members in the long term, and fail to be efficient in a game with restricted individual servers and limited content that yields meaningful resources.
You can have a general directive of a shared purpose, and you can have coordinated army control, but you can't dictate create/suggest people's gameplay for them.
Ultimately this is all due to the way Ashes distinguishes itself from sandboxes and ALSO distinguishes itself from themeparks.
I don't even think his Wishes, Demands, Hopes, Expectations are even a Problem.
While OOOOOOOOOOOOOO~kaaaay i think i also heard something around 50.000~ish kind of People at Maximum at a Server or so,
how is that supposed to run and go with 12.000 People in One Guild ? Even if a Server can support like 9000 People in the same Spot before collapsing -> this Number is just to high.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Kinda starting to look for a Guild right now. (German)
Maybe 100 accounts, instead of 100 characters? Seems like a fair way to incorporate an unlimited number of alts without also supporting mega guilds.
Theoretically, guild sizes could be regulated by the law of scarcity, or supply and demand, with no hard cap on size. This is the law that has governed the size civilizations all throughout history. If there aren't enough resources to support a population, that population will shrink until the population fits the supply, and vice versa.
In the case of Ashes, you could think up any number of mechanics that could create a scarcity within a guild. The key is just the not allow the supply to grow as the guild expands in size, be that territory or population. A few hypothetical examples:
1. Constraints on legendary crafting. A guild can only complete some quest to craft a legendary once a week. Obviously this introduces a bunch of other problems that would have to be designed around like sub-guilds, but you hopefully get the idea. People won't want to wait around with an inventory full of crafting materials while the guild elites hog the cooldowns.
2. Scarcity of housing. This already exists in the design, theoretically. A guild can only be patron to one node, and that node only has so much non-instanced housing. People want houses. People will leave for other nodes and therefore the guild in order to secure their own housing. I acknowledge this could be worked around by sub-guilds, so more design legwork to do there.
3. Guild/Node War event participation caps. If there are going to be 1k population guilds, it stands to reason that an event needs a cap on participants, otherwise even with server meshing the event area won't be able to handle the numbers. People are going to want to participate in these, and won't like being told they don't make the cut.
4. Guild War reward distribution. Perhaps and alternative to the above. If the reward for a guild war event doesn't scale to the number of participants, then wars with high participation will necessarily result in small payouts to the participants. Rewards would need to be sufficiently enticing for this to work, but could result in guild leadership putting their own constraints on number of participants in order to maximize their own profits.
I'm sure you guys have plenty of reasons why my hypotheticals wouldn't work, but you hopefully get the idea. Size can be regulated by scarcity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but EVE doesn't have any mechanics that introduce scarcity within corps, so they keep growing.
He made a nice thumbnail
This could let players pick their preferences for how 'zergy' the late game PvP ends up being. I can see an Olympics like spread from the 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1600.
I haven't watched the YouTube video, so I do not know how the information relates to guild sizes.
Guilds should have a low number of members, like 100 as posted above.
Real members, not some youtuber follower zombies.
Guilds of 100s should form alliances with other real guilds.
Guilds should start with 20 members at L1 and the leader and members should complete quests to increase the guild Lv, slot number and perks.
Hard quests.
If somebody manages to Lv up Pirates, Pirates2,... Pirates150 let them enjoy a 15000 guild. They earned it. But AoC should not provide tools or make guild managing easier.
If Devs decide to make guild managing "easier" they will end up with 2 zerg factions per server.
The alternative (100 member guilds) would result to a beautiful sea of banners of true self-defining guilds creating all sorts of wars and friendships. Great player driven contant.
I dont watch youtubers/twitchers playing mmos (or games for that matter except a bit of AoE4 recently), but every time I hear their possition of something, it makes me think that they have no brains.
I find it very weird that people of all ages watch other people playing games religiously, and take them as some short of role models. It's crazy.
I hope to end up playing on a server with people that are not followers of some1 else. People that have their own groups of friends, searching for guilds together, instead coming right out the gates at launch, belonging to some blob.
15k members? You *&%^**, the server aims to hold 10k active members at a time. It is known for years now.
Yeah, the internet is not good for society...
Once upon a time in a planet close enough, not too far back in time actually, people used to look up to successful leaders, champions, and wise men/women. They'd see people with talent on arts and try to achieve the same success. Having some talent was required.
But now everybody looks up to clowns, wants front flip on dwarves, wants to be funny every second of their life (online life/memeing, I should say) and seek youtube fame.
No wonder these clowns they are showered with money. They are holding back our societies potential.
No? Well then let’s move on from other such nonsense.
He can demand and call for that all he wants, his ideas are for one purpose and purpose only: FOR HIS STREAM. And as with any streamer - they do not care about the game, they move on to the next hype at some point. What does he care what happens to Ashes after he moves on to [next game]? He couldn't give a damn, after a few months his viewers demand for something new and whatever game provides him something new is where its at next.
Therefore I think all demands by people earning money through streaming ought to be largely ignored, because these demands are motivated by things that do not provide player retention for the vast majority.
That is the problem. Ashes of Creation is not EVE Online, and he seems to still be stuck on the processes and mindset that's useful for EVE instead of what's most healthy for Ashes. He wants a repeat of his old experiences with a new game and a new setup, but I don't think he's caught onto the differences in server structure that will make his mindset a problem.
If Ashes was a megaserver game, I'd honestly expect his path to be correct! But it's not. And he needs to grok that.
We dont need the guy.
There is no problem. Non issue.
And then everyone sees him as the valiant hero that tried to defend them, and carries on pouring their money into him.
That's not a leader. That's a politician.
I don't like this 'medium sized guild' thing that Ashes does, because it's actually exclusionary and leads to the exact thing I think most people don't want, lots of out-of-game pockets of communication and information, and then a lot of players who just do what they're told because they can't really justify being involved.
If your guild can only hold 100 members but your alliances are limited, in a game like Ashes, you can't 'afford to waste' any of those slots on more time-casual players. And that leads to guilds made up of only very serious players who then crush all the guilds that actually don't really have the numbers due to allowing in less devoted players.
I'm hoping that Nodes solve this, because if they don't, it will be Discord that 'solves' it, and that's not great, imo.
The megaguilds are already mega. Making them create satellite guilds to hold all their 'casuals' will lead to more trouble than I think is worth it and actually work against what Ashes is, if the guild sizes stay as they are.
Now, I don't think this means we should have 1500-member+ guild sizes, because that's a question of how guild wars work moreso. I'm more on the side of thinking we should have smaller guilds but larger options for alliances, and 'Alliance chat'. If you want 'more chance for megaguilds to experience friction or need political/management skill', don't give them a way to justify 'having an inner circle that doesn't get to actually see what's being discussed by their leaders/most active players only'.
That's going to happen enough outside of game, don't support it ingame too with these exclusionary guild sizes.
(I also believe that forming and re-forming alliances should have a gold cost, but that's an aside that just happens to go with my thoughts on this one)
I'm also biased in this. I personally very much dislike big gaming influencers, I've seen too many swarm games with their community like locusts, I've heard too many advocate for changes that ultimately only meant as long as they were interested in the game would benefit their business model of entertaining others by making more and more obnoxious stuff ingame.
I personally do not want to play on the same server as someone who is not primarily there to enjoy the game, but to make profit from showing others what they are doing. If I can, I will avoid the servers where any big streamer runs their business operation.
Again - I am well aware that probably most players aren't as concerned or annoyed by this and that's fine, I just think that most players are interested in this game for a non-profit reasons and therefore are more important than what influencers want the game to be.
Same for node citizenship. You can build more apartments to increase the # of citizens possible, or you can build something else that is useful or gives a benefit
IS should definitely not cave on guild size, as it is one of the design tradeoffs.